Bay Briefing: Tales of survival from Paradise

Evacuee Rachelle Sanders cradles newborn son Lincoln during a checkup just days after escaping the hospital during the Camp Fire in Butte County.

Photo: Gabrielle Lurie / The Chronicle

“If it comes down to it, if you have to run, take the baby,” Rachelle Sanders told the stranger next to her as flames inched closer to their car, melting the taillights. Her son Lincoln, cradled in her lap, was only 8 hours old.

“Leave me behind.”

Sanders and the rest of the patients at Feather River Hospital had been rushed into any car available as the Camp Fire barreled toward the hospital.

As firefighters still battle to put out the fire, reporter Lizzie Johnson takes us through the first, most dangerous hours, in which Paradise’s meticulous evacuation plans were scrapped as the fire overran the town, moving more than 6 miles in 90 minutes. Johnson tells the stories of how Sanders and five others escaped, made possible by acts of bravery, heroism and good fortune.

•Still not Karl: The Bay Area’s air quality has improved somewhat but will remain unhealthy until forecasted rains late Tuesday. Worried about what the smoke means for your long-term health? Little data on long-term outcomes from wildfire smoke exist, reporter Catherine Ho writes, but a Bay Area study focused on last year’s Wine Country fires is among the first.

•Leaning Tower of S.F.: There finally may be a plan to stabilize San Francisco’s infamous Millennium Tower, which has tilted 14 inches since opening in 2008. An engineer for the developer proposes drilling piles into bedrock at the building’s southwest corner. The $100 million fix would stabilize the tower but not remove the tilt. Still, City Hall is “encouraged by the ongoing progress,” one official tells Matier & Ross.

•Fun in too much sun: Ski season has begun at Tahoe’s biggest resorts, but the crucial element — snow — is thin on the ground and entirely artificial. Resorts are trying to put a happy face on it, but a warming climate means they can expect more years like this.

•Cerulean tsunami: With election day results almost settled, the Republican Party in California will probably hold only seven or eight of the state’s 53 House seats and Democrats will regain their supermajority in the state Senate. “In California, we didn’t have a takeover, we had an overthrow,” one political analyst says. But what’s left of the GOP in California can’t agree on why Republicans lost and what to do about it.

•We wouldn’t call it cheap but ... : The number of price cuts on Bay Area real estate was at its highest level in October since 2012. Kathleen Pender asks agents what this means for buyers and why an aggressive price cut doesn’t necessarily mean something’s wrong with the property.

•Becoming: Michelle Obama has “sworn to tell her readers everything, and she delivers on that promise,” Allyson Hobbs says in her consideration of the first lady’s new memoir. The book is intimate and bracing: “Parts of her story are familiar, but still, you lean in, eager to hear them again.”

•Jonestown, revisited: Marshall Kilduff was a Chronicle reporter in the 1970s whose first impression of the Rev. Jim Jones and his Peoples Temple flock was that it was “nothing sinister, just jarringly odd” — but also a story to be explored. Rebuffed by editors who didn’t want to look too closely, he eventually wrote the magazine expose that drove Jones to Guyana. Now one of our editorial writers, Kilduff uses his unique perspective to look back on a tragic saga where power brokers chose to ignore the signs of evil in Jones’ actions.

•Honoring the victims: The Peoples Temple members who followed Jones to the jungle and died 40 years ago may finally be remembered here with a physical memorial. As one survivor tells columnist Caille Millner, “It’s San Francisco history, and it should’ve never been swept under the carpet.”

•Forever Young: Joan Baez played her final San Francisco concert last week at the Masonic, but her farewell tour is avoiding big nostalgic goodbyes, pop music critic Aidin Vaziri writes in his review. Instead, the folk icon focused on gorgeous renditions of her songs and Bob Dylan classics and call to social justice movements of the moment.

•The long view: Native Son columnist Carl Nolte took a walk through Muir Woods — where redwoods date to the age of Genghis Khan, yet show scars of blazes through the centuries. The difference between California’s wildfires then and now, he reflects, is that today’s state has 39 million human residents.

The Kicker

The proposed San Francisco Giants stadium at Seventh and Townsend streets was unveiled in 1987, years before the China Basin project was finalized.

Photo: HOK+CTM 1987

In the latest Our SF, Peter Hartlaub takes a look at a proposed Giants ballpark back in 1987 that never came to be.

Then-owner Bob Lurie threatened to move the team out of town if he didn’t get a ballpark at Seventh and Townsend streets — one that incorporated the adjacent freeway in such a way, Hartlaub writes, that “it looked like the stadium entrails were spilling out of left field.”

Alas, the measure failed by 11,000 votes. Lurie sold the team in 1993, and what now is AT&T Park opened in 2000. So count your blessings, Giants fans, that this concept is filed away in the Chronicle archives under “San Francisco Stadium — Failed.”